2008. Originally announced in 1997 as the follow-up by Hypnos founder Mike Griffin to his debut Sudden Dark, Fabrications has been reworked, abandoned, restarted from scratch, back-burnered, reimagined, and left frozen in carbonite. Among those who have followed Hypnos from the beginning, Fabrications achieved a certain notoriety as the album always promised for release in the coming year, which never quite arrived. 2008 is finally the year in which Fabrications is revealed, perhaps appropriate for the 10-year anniversary of its original planned release date, 1998.

Generally known as an ambient minimalist, utilizing synthesizers for most of his work, this time M. Griffin took advantage of "real world" sounds, captured with binaural microphones using a portable digital audio recorder. For this release, Griffin built up collages of numerous location recording elements, including cars driving on freeways, people walking in long echoing hallways, the ocean waves in Kona at night, a metalworking factory with heavy machinery crunching away, distant trains, and clothes driers. These elements were manipulated, combined, worked-on and re-worked, and overlaid with looped spoken elements later created by Griffin in the studio. The end result comes out something like the Zoviet France soundtrack to a David Lynch film, that is, a dark and dream-like collage of loops, spoken fragments, disembodied whispers, and the echo of far-off machinery.

While ambient music recordings generally only include a few "layers," Fabrications has been painstakingly built-up over the years so that all tracks are now comprised of dozens of layers, in some cases upward of 100. The result is incredibly complex, with ghostly remnants of real, concrete sounds filtered one against another. Aural signatures of many real places combine to form sonic impressions of a series of locations that do not really exist. These imagined, artificial locales are in effect, fabrications.

This one was worth the wait. One of the most truly "ambient" recordings Hypnos has released, great listening for headphone-nauts. I've heard the third solo album will be coming out in 2018, so everybody should have lots of time to wrap their ears around these gorgeous micro-worlds of sound.

Thanks guys... and thanks, Drone On, for being one of the first to order.

Now, to deflect some of those "10 years between albums" jokes, I'd point out that Fabrications is my fifth solo album, and that even though it was 10 years (OK, 11 years) in the works, I did plenty of other stuff in between.

This is some gorgeously built, tripped out work! I know an album is great when I can just let the short samples loop over and over and I lose track that I am just listening to only one tiny section. Vast, deep, and sounds lovingly well-crafted!! You have fashioned some dark ambient nectar of the gods...

Thanks, everyone. It's nice to have it finished, and it feels good to release it with the knowledge that I didn't just say "screw it, it's done, let's make a CD out of it and put it behind me," but actually stuck with it until it had the level of novelty and complexity that I had set out to achieve.

Thanks very much, Joe, I appreciate your comments, and I'm very glad you enjoyed Fabrications.

I wouldn't normally feel "nervous" about letting a recording loose into the world but this one had built up so much complicated feeling and expectation about it, in my own mind, that it's especially pleasing to get the sense that people are receiving it the way I hoped.

Just got this yesterday, and am still digesting it myself. Very defense spooky concrete atmospheres that remind me in places of mid-period Zoviet France, but without the emphasis on looping. Some industrial-like abstract sounds midway through, but nothing Merzbow harsh. After Joe's comments, I'll have to try the headphones thing. Very nicely done. Mike!

I was thinking of Zoviet France's "Shouting at the Ground," and maybe, to a lesser extent the "Assault and Mirage" and "Misfits, Looney Tunes & Squalid Criminals" albums. It's been a while since I've listened to it, but I think there's a sidelong track on "Shouting" that has that spacey textural quality I hear in Fabrications.

Shouting at the Ground is one of my favorite ZF albums but I wondered if you had something else in mind... and I'll admit to never having heard "Misfits, Looney Toons etc" so I ought to try to track that one down if I can.

After lulling to sleep to MG's "Sudden Dark," I had a dream that the upcoming (promised by this millenium) CD will be titled "Possibilities," as it is unclear when exactly it will be available but it is possible it could be in the next couple years. I also dreamed the first two seconds of the album have been recorded (yet still to be mastered), leaving only approximately 3,500 seconds to complete. The sound source so far was Mike's Gillette electric razor recorded in a wind tunnel in an unknown location. A box set comprising Sudden Dark, Fabrications, Possibilities, and the as-yet-untitled fourth full length solo album will be available circa 2029, although date is subject to change. ;-)